Reflections on Persona 3
Is this a review? A retrospective? I just don’t know. All I know is that The Journey that began 15 years ago almost to the day has come to its conclusion.
In the many years that went by, I sometimes wondered if the reason why my attention was so captured by a random RPG I rented in my first year of GameFly. Did I spend so many nights playing it until 3 a.m. without realizing it because of the game itself, or my situation when I first played it? Persona 3: FES‘s twin themes of the sense of belonging and impending doom were very much relevant to my life then, after all.
It was in that time that I had graduated college into the Great Recession, returning to my “hometown” to scrape together whatever work I could to get by. Distant and all but cut off from the social links I had grown all those years in college, and with all prospects for my future fading away? Yeah, I can see a story like this resonating.
Those themes do hit differently now. And not because the “once-in-a-lifetime” disasters stopped occurring after that (quite the opposite, if that was too dry). I, sadly, consider myself very fortunate to have dragged myself to be at 40 where I “should have” been by 30. No, the themes remain relevant to my life; they’re just coming from different directions.
Picking up Persona3 and seeing it though came as I was (and am) once again in need of regrowing social links after years of being isolated by moves, long commutes, work itself and the pandemic. It came as dread for the future was less about the challenges of building one and more so of dread for the world at large. Would that dispatching despair be as easy as punching a demon in the face until the game lets you win. That, of course, is where my capacity to relate to the game as more than a game breaks down.
As much as the story compelled me to continue through the game, I’m happy to say I was also driven by the gameplay loops as well. I enjoyed exploring what few areas of the world I got to see when they first opened up. I enjoyed learning the intricacies of persona fusion and skill inheritance. For that matter, I enjoyed finding and collecting all the personas. I even enjoyed trying to plan my schedule, as though it were a puzzle. And in service to all that, the repetitive combat in the uninteresting dungeon didn’t seem all that bad. And it’s unfortunate that The Answer consists mostly of the lesser of The Journey’s parts.
Despite the ridiculous amount of time I spent in Tartarus or conducting fusion experiments, I keep coming back to the Social Links as the quintessential experience of Persona 3. It’s the nexus where all the different gameplay elements converge. You start links through exploration, even to the point where finding one link will lead you to finding another. They’re impossible to complete without refining your time management. Several require you to boost your stats to even start. Completing the links provide bonuses for persona fusion and unlock new fusions where the strongest skills in the game can be learned.
But more than that, the Social Links cut straight to the essence of the story despite being entirely optional to the main plot. While they all start out innocuously or even cliched, as you progress through them it becomes quite clear that your party members don’t have a monopoly on tragic past events that hold them back. While you could finish the game without going out of your way to maxing out any of the social links (even though a late-game cutscene implies otherwise), it’s missing the point not to, and not just for the combat benefits. Each one reinforces the core idea of facing and recovering from a personal tragedy. And in the playable epilogue, each completed link reminds you that you helped them grow beyond their own cycle of despair and that they are doing amazing now.
You see, that last part of Persona 3 was missing in 2008, seeing as I had only played about ⅓ of the game before inexplicably allowing it to drift off into the backlog. And while the masses becoming so apathetic that they cry out for the world to end seems a hell of a lot closer to reality now than it would have then, I really could have used the example of those 18 people who overcame tragedy to be shining examples of hope in a world that was otherwise filled with misery and those simply enslaved to the motions of their lives. You know, like that salaryman before he played Tears of the Kingdom.
Though in the end, there’s no way to know what difference it would have made. Perhaps it could have been the pep needed to push me beyond my own flaws, or perhaps inspiration was never the problem. But one thing is certain: I shouldn’t have taken 15 years to get here.
About The Author
Drew
Features Editor | Drew started behind the 8(bit)-ball in the video game world. He first became interested in anime by chance exposure on the Sci-Fi channel. Drew's the creative force behind blog-wide features, works the movie and food beats, and pioneered Damage Control’s entry into video, podcasts and streaming.
